Achrekar sir has built the foundation on which I stand today, says Sachin Tendulkar

Shivaji Park. Sachin Tendulkar. Ramakant Achrekar. The cricketing world wanted to know more about this link only after a cherubic-faced 16-year-old took guard in Karachi against Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, and Waqar Younis on November 15, 1989. But to those who followed the game in the maidans of Mumbai, Achrekar did not coach cricket to kids, he created cricketers out of them. “Other coaches taught kids how to bat and bowl; Achrekar trained them into play matches,” former Mumbai captain Milind Rege told Mirror yesterday.

Sanjay Manjrekar, who has witnessed the rise of Tendulkar from close quarters, maintains that by the time Tendulkar had entered his teens, he had hit a far higher number of balls than any kid his age.

The story goes that the moment Tendulkar got out in a maidan match, Achrekar would ask him to hop onto his scooter. The coach and the pupil would travel to the adjoining maidan, where Tendulkar would get to bat in another match.

By the time he was 10 years old, he was playing around 15 matches a month, mostly against boys twice his age. Tendulkar himself has said that those matches played a huge part in his early development.

Yesterday, a distraught Tendulkar said his “sir will enrich the game in heaven”. “He taught me to not only play straight, but also live straight,” Tendulkar said. “Like a lot of his students, I learnt the ABC of cricket from sir. His contribution to not just my cricket career but to my life cannot be captured in words. He has built the foundation that I stand on today,” he said.

It was a ritual among Achrekar’s students to seek his blessings every Guru Purnima. Tendulkar would be joined by his wife Anjali at Achrekar’s house in Dadar. “I had met sir along with some of his students last month,” Tendulkar reminisced. “Like always, we shared a laugh as we remembered the old times.”

In one of his interviews, Achrekar had narrated his first meeting with Tendulkar. “His brother Ajit had brought him to me and I asked him to come back the next day in proper cricket clothes. The first time I saw Sachin, he seemed to be just like the other boys. But then I watched him in the nets and he was middling the ball all the time, hitting it hard, never playing defensive. I thought, ‘baat toh hain’.”

It was at Achrekar’s insistence that Tendulkar’s family shifted him to Shardashram School in Dadar. It meant the kid had to live with a relative in Dadar, away from his Bandra East house. And again, on Achrekar’s insistence, the Raj Singh Dungarpurcontrolled Cricket Club of India bent the rules to allow a 13-year-old Tendulkar to play for the club.

Born in 1932 in Malvan in Sindhudurg, near Goa, Achrekar landed in Mumbai at the age of 11, when his parents decided to shift. He eventually found employment with the State Bank of India where he formed a close friendship with a colleague, Ajit Wadekar, who went on to captain Mumbai and India. Achrekar himself was a batsman-wicketkeeper who played one first-class match -- for All-India State Bank against Hyderabad in 1964, scoring 30.

He began coaching cricket only around 1968 when a youngster approached him for advice. That youngster was Ramnath Parkar who played for India in 1980s, kickstarting the ‘Achrekar factory’ that produced Balwinder Singh Sandhu, Lalchand Rajput, Chandrakant Pandit, Vinod Kambli, Ajit Agarkar, Praveen Amre, the current Team India batting coach Sanjay Bangar, Paras Mhambrey, and Sameer Dighe, all of whom went on to play for India. This is besides over a hundred first-class cricketers coached by him.

As Tendulkar said, the Gods would be seeking a few cricketing tips from his coach.

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